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Death Penalty for Rampage at Fort Hood

KILLEEN, Tex. — Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who admitted to killing 13 unarmed people at Fort Hood nearly four years ago, was sentenced to death by lethal injection by a jury on Wednesday, becoming one of only a handful of men on military death row.

Since the case against Major Hasan was overwhelming, his conviction was a near certainty, and the main question in the trial was whether he would receive the death penalty.

Prosecutors had from the start built a case for execution for an attack that a Senate report called the worst act of terrorism on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. But Major Hasan, a Muslim, taunted the military justice system, refusing to put up a defense and suggesting in and out of court that death to him was but a means to martyrdom, leaving jurors to ponder whether to give him what he wanted.

His stance left the Army’s lead prosecutor, Col. Michael Mulligan, telling jurors during his closing argument on Wednesday morning that Major Hasan was not and never would be a martyr.

The jurors took a little more than two hours to decide on the sentence. If even one of them had objected to Major Hasan’s execution, he would have been sentenced to life in prison. The same jury on Friday found Major Hasan guilty of 45 counts of murder and attempted murder.

Video

Fort Hood Victims’ Families Speak

Relatives of those killed in the 2009 Fort Hood shootings shared their thoughts after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was sentenced to death.

Because of the high profile and heavy toll of the Nov. 5, 2009, attack — more than 40 people were killed or wounded — Major Hasan is likely to become the first American soldier in more than half a century to be executed in the military’s death chamber at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The execution would require presidential approval.

Driven, he said, by a hatred of American military action in the Muslim world and a desire to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, Major Hasan turned on troops wearing the same camouflage uniform as his own, using those green fatigues and his laser-sighted semiautomatic pistol to target soldiers but avoid civilians. Firing 146 rounds at men and women as they crawled on the floor or crouched behind desks and cubicles, he killed 12 soldiers and a civilian who lunged at him with a chair.

Inside a Fort Hood courtroom fortified with blast-resistant barriers, Major Hasan showed no emotion as the jury forewoman read the sentence.

Other death sentences have been handed down by juries in military courts in recent years — Hasan Akbar, the Army sergeant convicted of a grenade attack on his own camp in Kuwait, received one in 2005 — but experts in military law said Major Hasan’s case was unique because of the enormity of the crime, the likelihood of presidential approval of an execution and his decision to act as his own lawyer.

Major Hasan was the first defendant to represent himself in a military capital-punishment case in modern times, raising a host of issues. One of them is the conflict between his right to self-representation and the requirement that death penalty defendants be given special protections to ensure a fair verdict and sentence.

Some military legal experts suggested that Major Hasan’s case — in which he became a nonparticipant at his own trial and sought the death sentence — represented a fundamental breakdown of the military justice system. Others disputed that assertion.

Major Hasan was found competent to stand trial, and the judge, Col. Tara A. Osborn, who repeatedly told him it was unwise to proceed on his own, said his right to represent himself allowed him to be, as she put it, “the captain of his own ship.”

Major Hasan admitted to the jury in his opening statement that he was the gunman. He asked few questions, made few objections to testimony and entered one exhibit into evidence. He made no closing argument.

Major Hasan’s former Army defense lawyers had asked the judge to allow them to put on a sentencing defense over his objections. They planned on calling 59 witnesses and presenting evidence to counter prosecutors’ portrayal of him. In a motion filed with the judge, they also argued that enemies of the United States might use a Muslim “martyr-in-waiting” to inspire other attacks. The judge denied their request.

The jury never heard much of the evidence explaining Major Hasan’s wish for martyrdom. In a July 2011 jailhouse statement to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite broadcasting network, Major Hasan began by quoting verses from Chapter 18 of the Koran, in which God, he said, will give “glad tidings to the believers who do righteous deeds, that they shall have a fair reward.” In December 2010, he told a military mental health panel that if he died by lethal injection, “I would still be a martyr.”

Neither document was admitted as evidence, but one document that was part of the jury’s deliberations involved the definition of jihad, or holy war, the precise language of which both prosecutors and Major Hasan had agreed to. It was defined as a duty to combat the enemies of Islam, fulfilled by the heart, the tongue, the hand or the sword. Those who die fighting in God’s cause, the two parties agreed, are “guaranteed a place in paradise.”

The four condemned prisoners at Fort Leavenworth have languished for years and even decades as their cases are appealed. The last execution there was in April 1961, with the hanging of John A. Bennett, an Army private convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl.

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Major Hasan will be sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to await execution.Credit
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

If Major Hasan, who will soon turn 43, is executed, it will probably not be for 10 or 15 years. An automatic appeals process will inch his case through the appellate courts, which have overturned or commuted a number of military death sentences in recent years, often because of procedural issues involving ineffective legal assistance.

The jury heard from nearly 90 witnesses in 11 days and was presented with more than 700 pieces of evidence. But it was the testimony of one group of witnesses that probably had the most impact. During the sentencing phase on Monday and Tuesday, 20 survivors of the attack and relatives of those Major Hasan killed took the witness stand.

The court-martial up to then had been a buttoned-down proceeding devoid of all but the most subtle hints of emotion. The testimony of the relatives, however, unleashed a flood of heartache.

Angela Rivera, the widow of Maj. Libardo E. Caraveo, 52, said that when she and their young son used to drive by the airport, he often asked when they were going to pick up Daddy. Christine Gaffaney, who had been married for 33 years to Capt. John Gaffaney, 56, said his clothes were still in the closet at home and his Harley still in the garage.

Relatives spoke of suicide attempts and families that split apart after the loss of a husband, wife, son or daughter.

Staff Sgt. Patrick L. Zeigler Jr., who was shot four times, limped to the stand and told the jury that 20 percent of his brain had been removed.

Philip Warman, the husband of Lt. Col. Juanita L. Warman, 55, testified that he had started drinking after his wife’s death, but then got help and is now sober. A prosecutor asked him what he did with the coins he received at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings representing the milestones of his sobriety.

“I would push them into the ground of my wife’s grave,” Mr. Warman said.

A version of this article appears in print on August 29, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Death Penalty For Rampage At Fort Hood. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe